Posts by Paul Berry

Re: Race to the Bottom

> When was the last time they ever did any investigative journalism of merit?

You either have a very short or selective memory: Nick Davies in The Guardian broke the details on the bubbling-under phone hacking scandal that eventually brought down a certain newspaper. I'm in no way in favour of the proposed funding model but I'd call that a coup for investigative journalism if ever there was one.

Software Crisis, restated?

Isn't this simply another restatement of what we understand to be the "Software Crisis"? It's been getting on for fifty years since it was first realised there will never be enough skilled people to work in all aspects of IT. Nothing new under the sun...

Don't broadcast your SSID

Not solving a problem, but moving it

The only way Amazon (or anyone else) can truly solve the deliver-to-home problem is to have their own delivery service. This isn't it. It's just a variation on "your item couldn't be delivered and is at our (delivery partner's) depot" without even the attemped delivery first.

Not condoning it but...

Digital doesn't degrade gracefully

Until digital radio and TV via aerial don't cut out randomly all the time, even in areas of "good reception", we might see a bigger uptake. The cheek of asking the public to pay for a system which is admittedly better in some respects than analogue, but A LOT worse in others, is staggering.

The "Chicken Little" you speak of...

Who takes the hit for fraudulent use?

It should be the bank/card issuer but I bet it won't be. The customer is liable for any fraudulent use of their account via online banking and I can't see that changing with contactless POS technology. We didn't see that untenable shift of responsibilities coming then, but we sure are tuned into it now.

The potential suckiness won't be a technological issue, it'll be a political one.

The generation that pulled the ladder up behind them

That'd be because Chrome is lean and fast

Don't get me wrong, I love Firefox. But, on older, slower machines where I just want to do a quick Google search, it's Chrome every time because I don't want to wait 15 minutes for Firefox to start. Searching by typing the address bar is a big usability win, too.

Conceptual failure?

Using a postcode as good-enough shorthand for a geographcial point? It should be considered a fail. Postcodes are used to route mail, not find directions to a point. I can see why this has happened but overloading the meaning of a code with concepts it was never intended for is bound to cause trouble. Unfortunately the concept of a postcode as a geographical entity is so ingrained even the government routinely make this mistake.

Voting Machines

What is the problem here that only technology can solve? Is paper and pencil not good enough? Seems to be another hi-tech "solution" in search of a problem that doesn't exist, because that's where the money is.

Not news is you read RISKS anyway: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/php/risks/search.php?query=voting

Where the mechanics of the system (and here it's closed-source software) cannot be independently inspected, monitored, or supervised then it's scarcely a solid foundation for democracy.